2010-03-20

I do quite a bit of scrolling in emacs, but I hardly ever use the scroll bar
for that. The main reason for still having the scroll bar is that it gives me
some indication where I am in the buffer. Of course, there is some information
in the mode-line, and you can get some more with size-indication-mode, but
it's not as immediately obvious as the scroll bar.
But recently, I discovered Lennart Borgman's sml-modeline, which
combines all of the scroll bar information into a nice visual indication on
the modeline, and I have been happily using it, and got rid of my scroll bar.
Put you sml-modeline in your load-path, and the following fragment in your
.emacs should do the trick:

(if (require 'sml-modeline nil 'noerror) ;; use sml-modeline if available
(progn
(sml-modeline-mode 1) ;; show buffer pos in the mode line
(scroll-bar-mode -1)) ;; turn off the scrollbar
(scroll-bar-mode 1) ;; otherwise, show a scrollbar...
(set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)) ;; ... on the right

Note, there is a older version available in Emacswiki which has some problems
(such as conflicting with the Standard ML editing mode for emacs); thus, for
now it's better to us the Launchpad version; the instructions above apply to
that version.